VFR-descent planner

Advisory route planning

Suggest a route that keeps a VFR-reporting airport within range at every point — ETOPS planning with a live-weather suitability predicate.

This tool suggests a route and shows margins. It never asserts that the weather will hold or that the route is authoritative. Stale or missing weather makes an airport unusable (fail-safe). Advisory / planning use only — not for navigation.

Plan a VFR-descent route

Range defaults to a 40 nm distance disk. Time-at-speed (range_min + speed_kt) and glide (glide_ratio + altitude_ft) modes are available as query parameters — see /v1/plan. Plans are capped at 600 nm great-circle — farther than that, use the trip planner.

Local equirectangular projection, north up. Green fills are range rings (radius R) around suitable, VFR-reporting airports — their union is the covered region. 81 suitable airports in the region. Coverage is tested by sampling the great circle every sampleSpacingNm; a covered verdict is exact only to ±sampleSpacingNm/2. An uncovered sliver narrower than the spacing can be missed. Advisory, not a defended claim.

Route · 10 legs · 398.1 nm

#	From	To	Via	Dist (nm)	Coverage
1	KPHN	VIPOR	join	14.7 nm	covered
2	VIPOR	KC81Q	corridor	58.7 nm	covered
3	KC81Q	LEATO	corridor	26.6 nm	covered
4	LEATO	BABBE	corridor	55.7 nm	covered
5	BABBE	CACNO	corridor	26.5 nm	covered
6	CACNO	NENSE	corridor	57.9 nm	covered
7	NENSE	WISOM	corridor	45.0 nm	covered
8	WISOM	IJAFI	corridor	58.9 nm	covered
9	IJAFI	BAITS	corridor	24.0 nm	covered
10	BAITS	KRCX	join	30.2 nm	covered

Great-circle A→B is 396.0 nm; the planned route is 398.1 nm.

Diversion table (ETOPS-style)

Leg	Nearest suitable	Bearing (°)	Dist (nm)	Best cover	Margin (nm)
KPHN→VIPOR	KMTC	198°	22.3 nm	KMTC	14.9 nm
VIPOR→KC81Q	KHYX	297°	0.7 nm	KCFS	2.5 nm
KC81Q→LEATO	KMBS	120°	0.4 nm	KIKW	25.0 nm
LEATO→BABBE	KIKW	117°	12.2 nm	KHTL	▼ -1.7 nm
BABBE→CACNO	KFKS	333°	21.2 nm	KFKS	5.0 nm
CACNO→NENSE	KSUE	316°	15.6 nm	KFKS	▼ -15.7 nm
NENSE→WISOM	KEZS	281°	3.3 nm	KOCQ	14.5 nm
WISOM→IJAFI	KRRL	296°	2.2 nm	KAIG	7.5 nm
IJAFI→BAITS	KRRL	102°	3.6 nm	KMDZ	18.1 nm
BAITS→KRCX	KRCX	290°	0.0 nm	KPBH	11.8 nm

Per leg: the nearest suitable airport (bearing from the leg midpoint) and the single airport that best blankets the leg, with margin = R − its worst-point distance. A negative margin (▼) means no single airport covers the whole leg — the union still may; this is a per-airport lower bound, not an over-claim.

Snapshot & configuration

Nav cycle: 2610
Artifact: 7005c1401bd4
METAR reports used: 136 of 831
Oldest observation: 2026-10-15T01:45:00.000Z
Range R: 40 nm → 40.0 nm
Weather minimum: VFR only · 75 min max age
Routing: mixed · corridor 30 nm
Constraint: hard
Min runway: 3000 ft
Coverage test: ±0.75 nm

This plan is reproducible from the values above: the same nav cycle, artifact, METAR observation times, and config yield the same route. Coverage is tested by sampling; a “covered” verdict is exact only to the tolerance shown. Weather is an ephemeral overlay — never merged into the navigation data.

Advisory / planning only · AIRAC cycle 2610 · not a certified navigation source.